Gn 12:1-4

20 February 2005

2nd Sunday in Lent

“Continuing the Journey”

            Our Old Testament reading, the call of Abram (whose name is later changed to Abraham), is often portrayed as a response to a bolt from the blue.  At least, I’ve heard stories with that kind of tone.  He, and he alone, is pictured as having a trust that puts all those around him to shame.  I’ve heard Abraham described as abruptly deciding that God has told him to drop what he’s doing and leave everything behind.  And then he does that very thing.

            Of course, Genesis tells a slightly different story.  Toward the end of chapter 11, we see this:  “Terah took his son Abram and his grandson Lot…, and his daughter-in-law Sarai [later known as Sarah], his son Abram's wife, and they went out together from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan; but when they came to Haran, they settled there” (v. 31).

            It’s actually Abraham’s father, Terah, who leads them from their ancestral home in the city of Ur, in what is now southern Iraq.  You can see this on the map on the back of your worship bulletin.  They travel almost a thousand miles northwest, up the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, to Haran, in what is now eastern Syria.  Canaan lies a few hundred miles to the southeast.  They avoid the harsh Arabian desert, following what for ages has been called the Fertile Crescent.

            We don’t know why Terah decides to make the journey.  We just know that he stops at about two-thirds the way there.  It falls to Abraham to continue the journey to Canaan, a land he’s never seen.  No doubt, that’s why he’s celebrated as the hero of faith.  (One of the reasons, anyway.)

            There’s something else about Abraham.  With chapter 12 and his response to God’s call, he is often considered to be the first Biblical figure to walk onto the stage of history.  The first eleven chapters are considered to be prehistory.  Other ancient cultures had parallel stories.  There were other stories of the great flood; there were other genealogies that assigned enormous life spans to people.  Some Mesopotamian kings were said to have lived tens of thousands of years.

            Anyway, the point is that Abraham is the first person in the Bible that all cultures seem to agree…to put it very simply, actually existed.  After all, he is the father of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

            Still, more important for our purposes is how the sudden change in historical perspective highlights Abraham’s decision.  What I mean is this:  as we consider today’s scripture text, we not only begin a new chapter in the book of Genesis, but much more importantly, we begin a new chapter in the history of the human race.

            In his commentary, E. A. Speiser says, “Abraham’s journey to the Promised Land was…no routine expedition of several hundred miles.  Instead, it was the start of an epic voyage in search of spiritual truths, a quest that was to constitute the central theme of all biblical history.”[1]  Well, that certainly doesn’t sound like your ordinary moving trip!  Indeed, this is a journey symbolic of all spiritual quests.

            Did Abraham already have it in his head before leaving Ur that he had to go to Canaan?  Or was it only after they settled in Haran?  Some have suggested a dispute between father and son over the matter of idolatry.  Both Ur and Haran were centers of moon worship.  The Qur’an, the holy book of Islam, portrays him as worshiping the stars, then the moon, then the sun—none of which satisfied him.  Then, discovering the one true God, Abraham was forced to turn his back on the faith of his ancestors (6:74-83).

            How much of this is in play when Abraham is told to “go forth”?  Was his life threatened?  No one knows for sure.  Rabbi Shai Held, who is the Director of Education at Harvard Hillel (for you Gentiles, that’s a Jewish school!) has suggested that Abraham “is told first and foremost that he must be willing to go, to leave the places in his life that are safe and comfortable, and to question the status quo.  Leaving the land of his father is both a literal obligation and a metaphor for the [true] life [of faith].”[2]

            You know all that stuff I was saying about how there’s a major shift in history at the beginning of chapter 12?  Well, there is a reason for all that drama!  Abraham is entering into a covenant with the Most High God, and what a covenant it is:  “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and will make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.  I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (vv. 2-3).  I will make of you a great nation.  Remember, this promise is to Abraham, whose wife Sarah is unable to have children.  He either has plenty of faith, or he is seriously delusional.

            Add to that the fact that Abraham is called to travel to a place that, for him, is a mystery.  He doesn’t know what lies ahead.  Our friend Rabbi Held adds that the covenant life of faith “offers no guarantee of security, no promise of ease or convenience.  Instead, it asks us to shatter the idols of security and settledness, and to aspire to a different kind of reality.  The covenant is born in the moment when God calls for the courage to abandon complacency.”[3]

            Can security and settledness actually be idols?  Imagine—the covenant with God requiring the courage to abandon complacency and apathy.  Abraham “must journey toward a place that is radically different from what he, and humanity as a whole, have known until now.”[4]  I wonder if he has any second thoughts!

            I won’t pretend that this isn’t some daunting stuff.  It’s scary for us as individuals, and it’s scary for us as a congregation.  Three weeks ago at the congregational meeting, there was some real fear in the air regarding Westminster’s future.  It helped to produce some moments of…irritation, but underneath that was the fear.  And I understand that.

            But remember, faith isn’t dependent on any particular feelings; it isn’t subject to human emotions.  And neither is blessing, to which Father Abraham has been called.  Notice, he’s not called to offer a blessing or to perform some ritual of blessing.  He’s called to “be a blessing, [to] embody blessing in his very being.”

            Again, Rabbi Held (I really think I like this guy!):  “Authentic covenantal Judaism aspires to a world in which all human beings—and not just all Jews—live with full dignity, aware of and responsive to the love of God.”[5]  If that’s true of Judaism, then it’s certainly true of disciples of Jesus Christ.

            He elaborates on this idea of blessing by mentioning God’s promise to Abraham in chapter 15 that his descendants will be like the stars of heaven (v. 5).  That’s a reference to the great number of Abraham’s descendants, but according to Jewish tradition, it can also mean something else.

            “Like stars, we are obligated to bring a little bit of light to the dark places of the world.  Wherever there is suffering, sadness, and heartbreak, there we are sent by God to bring love and [reform].  We are called to see beyond ourselves.  Perhaps that is why Abraham is told to look to the heavens:  He has learn to see beyond his own immediate concerns, to feel the needs of others as deeply as his own.”[6]

            I think that’s a key part of the remedy to the latent fear that we may have.  It’s interesting how focusing on the needs of others, and not being so inward looking, can change our whole disposition.  We as a church need to rediscover our mission—here in the Jamestown area and elsewhere.

            When I speak of mission, I’m talking about something completely separate from taking up offerings.  Money is important, but I mean something much more interactive.  For a while, the food pantry was an expression of that kind of mission.  It was truly a blessing.  Anyone who’s had to decide between buying food, buying medicine, or paying the rent understands.

            Glen Bengson, a Lutheran pastor from Xenia, Ohio, and a member of Bread for the World, tells the story of a visit by a doctor from Tanzania.  He says he “once visited our area for ten weeks, going from one congregation to another.  He was astounded at our medical facilities, not to mention the general level of wealth in the United States.  Visiting an emergency room with each patient area equipped with oxygen outlets in the wall, he told how his hospital, with 200 beds, had only two oxygen tanks, and one always had to be on ready in the surgery unit.  He heard the litany ‘God bless America’ and was puzzled.  ‘God has already blessed you so much.  Do you want more?’”[7]

            We are called to be a blessing.  Those with the faith of Abraham—the faith of our Lord Jesus—are part of the covenant with God.  That’s a covenant in which blessing is a continuous cycle.  We are blessed to be a blessing—to all the families of the earth.

            I want to finish today as I did two weeks ago:  with a quotation that I think is really awesome.  Again, this is from my new best friend, Rabbi Shai Held.[8]

            “This, then, is the way covenant is born:  We are told to leave what is safe and comfortable in search of a better place and a more authentic self, a self that is blessing at its very core.  In order to achieve this, we have to know that God wants us to become godly in a very distinctive way—namely, to love and value the other as deeply as we love and value ourselves.

“The road to the Promised Land is often dark and painful, filled with human suffering and degradation.  It is those very places to which God dispatches us, to bring blessing, and thus to become blessing.  It is in the moments of truly surpassing ourselves that the covenant becomes genuinely embodied in our lives.  And so we go, for God and for ourselves, toward the blessing that is the Promised Land, and toward the Promised Land that is blessing.”

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